Another Livingston Parish Ancient Cypress Landmarked
Livingston Parish and the Amite River Watershed are proving to have a treasure trove of ancient cypress, perhaps unmatched in Southeast Louisiana. (Click our inventory and map tabs above for a summary of some of the landmarked cypress in Livingston Parish). The Tickfaw River/State Park area, Bayou Barbary, and King George Bayou have offered up dozens of centuries old cypress. The most recent addition to this list is the Colyell Bayou area near French Settlement.
Click here to view the map. (Click teardrop markers on map for GPS and tree info.)
In July of 2020 Jesse Murphy and I paddled through a good portion of the “Murphy Badlands” cypress swamp. This cypress swamp adjacent to Colyell Creek near French Settlement, owned by generations of the French Settlement Murphys, is sprinkled with at least two dozen centuries old cypress, three of which are located on the map below. The coring we took of one of these trees reveals an extremely old cypress, which has the distinction of being among the two or three oldest known cypress in the Livingston Parish/Amite River watershed, based on ring counts from borings:
Here are the statistics on what Jesse has named the “Parrain Cypress”:
Circumference: 23’6”—measured 6 ft. from base
Diameter: 7’6” Radius: 3’9”
Boring length: 2.5” Rings counted: 175
Projected age: 1100+ years
This is a conservative age estimate. Even with likely much faster growth and thus more widely space rings in the now hollow early growth center of the tree, the ring count projection would make the tree much older than 1100 years (ring count corroborated by an LSU dendrochronologist)
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| Jesse Murphy awarding Parrain Tree Plaque #72 |
As can be seen from the photograph, yearly rings on the boring sample are extremely closely spaced; this combined with the tree’s very large circumference leads to the likelihood that this is a millennial cypress—at least 800 years old at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
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